Not ambitious or equitable

Representatives at the COP21 Climate Conference in Paris on December 12, 2015. Photo: Getty images

The Paris climate change summit has ended. The leaders of the world-the US, Europe and even China and India- are hailing the agreement as historic and ambitious. But I disagree. Paris climate agreement is a compromise deal, in many ways it can be termed as the lowest minimum denominator. Why do I say this? The fact is that the agreement, without any legal targets for the developed world to cut emissions, puts the world on a path of a 3 degree rise in temperature-which will be devastating for the world. It does not expect developed countries to increase their level of ambition to cut emissions for the next 10 years.

Sunita Narain

Most importantly, the rich industrialised countries have won a significant battle to erase their historical responsibility- earlier emissions that created the problem of climate change and that have today put the entire world at risk- have been written off. This was the key demand of the US, which has contributed over 21 per cent alone to the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But removal of the phrase historical responsibility will weaken the obligations of developed countries to take actions due to their past emissions. Without historical responsibility, equity will be interpreted through the words 'respective capabilities and national circumstances', further removing differentiation between actions of developed and developing countries.

What we have got in return are 'words' of justice and equity and some 'promise' of money, which has never ever been fulfilled till date. The words 'Equity' and 'Common But Differentiated Responsibilities' have come in many places, but gets negated by the fact that the Nationally Determined Contributions of countries are not legally binding and everyone has to take on mitigation commitments. So, the firewall that existed between countries that had created the problem and were required to take first action has been removed in this way.

But what should worry us most is the fact that the agreement does not have any reference to the limited and finite carbon budget-the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted to keep the world below 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees C-the guardrail of safety is gone. In this way developed countries can continue to disproportionally appropriate carbon space in the future as they have done in the past. A fair distribution of the remaining carbon space based on historical responsibilities could have avoided this inequity.

The initial draft included a mention of the sharing of global carbon budget, however this has been removed- presumably because of pressure from the United States. This is unacceptable as this now paves the way for the burden of transition to be shifted completely from the developed to the developing world.

It has been accepted that a mechanism on loss and damage- to estimate the loss because of climate change and to estimate its damage on economies and people-will be established. But the US has won again because it has also been made clear that this provision will not involve or provide basis for compensation or liability. In this way, no country will be able to demand that it should be awarded damages for the impact that it will suffer because of climate change. The rich, industrialised world has once again erased its responsibility and cleaned its dirty slate.

In terms of finance, the differential has been maintained by stating that the developed countries will provide support to developing countries for both mitigation and adaptation. This is the only place where equity has been operationalized. But we know that the promise of finances has always been illusionary and so whereas the previous draft mentioned $100 billion to be made available, it has been removed from the current draft agreement.

So, India-and it must be admitted that its negotiators fought hard in Paris-has got the right words like equity and common but differentiated responsibilities mentioned in many places. It also included terms such as climate justice, sustainable lifestyle and consumption. But these, not being in the operational text, do not qualify as commitments.

But it has not been able to operationlise equity, and it has allowed the rich industrialised countries to appropriate a large and disproportionate share of the global commons. It is also chear that there will be greater pressure on countries like India to reduce our emissions and that this transition will have to happen at our costs. This is ironical and immoral, because countries like the US have little restraint on their growth. In fact, the US climate change plan is nothing more than business as usual. This is what Paris has missed correcting. It has only furthered climate apartheid.

Sunita Narain is an environmentalist and political activist

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